Analysis of write amplification on solid state drives in datacenters

Abstract

Solid state drives (SSD) becomes the dominant type of secondary memory in personal computer systems, thanks to their superior read and write performance when compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDD). Due to the limitations of NAND flash memory technology SSD has several disadvantages that make them unfavorable for permanent data storage in data centers. One of the critical factors in SSD operation is write amplification which introduces additional system writes that must be performed for each user write, thus increasing cell wear and reducing drive performance. In this paper, we analyzed the write amplification of SSD drives operating in the Backblaze data center.